Waking Up with Sam Harris is my top recommendation, hands down. The guests are phenomenal, and Sam’s voice really adds something to the experience that you don’t get in print. Two episodes with Paul Bloom—The Virtues of Cold Blood and The Dark Side—are among my favorites. Before Sam had his own podcast he appeared on many others, and he still does from time to time. These are all that I could find:

I used to read a lot of Peter Singer in my school years, and have always been quite easily persuaded by his writings. So, when I got his 2009 book The Life You Can Save, I already knew the basic argument, that I would find no reasonable objections, and that the conclusion would be uncomfortable. It sat on my bookshelf for over a year, unread.

Perhaps it was the latent discomfort that pushed me to finally take the book off the shelf. A one-sentence summary will do: If you can prevent suffering or death, without sacrificing anything nearly as important, then you should. There are some philosophically interesting problems, many oft-repeated concerns, and a few lingering doubts, but as expected nothing that makes inaction look like the best choice.

The landscape has changed a bit since The Life You Can Save, with the emergence of the philosophy and movement now known as effective altruism. Three similarly-titled books on these issues were recently published, and I binge-read them all: Singer’s new book The Most Good You Can Do, William MacAskill’s Doing Good Better, and Nick Cooney’s How To Be Great At Doing Good. The latter was not my cup of tea, but the other two are both great reads. If I had to recommend one book it would be Doing Good Better.

I will make no attempt to summarize, because the authors have done that themselves in many podcasts and videos. Singer and MacAskill’s Aussie and Scottish dialects add to the experience, and I’ve gone through everything I could find. My top picks are in bold.

Now what? Some effective altruists are giving 10–50% of their income, which is in equal parts inspiring and intimidating. The most good you can do is very good indeed, but Singer also suggests a minimum standard for giving, a baseline to get us started. I’ll give it a try.

I pledge that over the coming year I will give 2.5% of my (after-tax) income to organizations effectively helping people living in extreme poverty.

This is the story of the Fullscreen API, one of prefixes, capitalization, and event targets…

March–October 2007: “Shouldn’t the video API include a way to toggle full screen on/off?” asks Mihai Sucan, a mere month after Opera’s debut of the video element. Much is said about the security implications of such an API, nothing happens, and years pass…

September–December 2011: Chris Pearce (Mozilla) begins implementing the proposal in Gecko. Meanwhile, Anne van Kesteren (then Opera, now Mozilla) starts working on a spec at the W3C. The fullscreen element stack is introduced, which makes nested fullscreen (e.g. video in a presentation) possible. When exiting from nested fullscreen, it now becomes un-obvious which element(s) to notify, so the event target is changed to the document.Revisions: 1c36dc1c92c5, 332cd2925b28

These spec changes are implemented in Gecko, but the old names, and mozFullScreen, are kept:

Notably, the webkitfullscreenchange event target is the fullscreen element, not the document. Because the event bubbles, listening on the document does work, though.Revision: 111028

September 2012: The Fullscreen API moves to the WHATWG. The W3C version has been unmaintained ever since.

November 2012: Opera 12.10 is released with support for the spec as it was in February, without prefixes. Opera 12 is the last major version based on Presto, so this unprefixed implementation does not last long.

The MSFullscreenChange event is fired on the document… and bubbles! Most likely the implementation predates the spec change.

Now: This is a bit of a mess! The long history of changes in capitalization and event targets has given JavaScript library authors ample opportunity to write code that will fail once the unprefixed API is made available. I’m trying to implement and ship the unprefixed Fullscreen API in Blink, and some bumps in the road are likely.

Blink and WebKit have a setting for requiring a “user gesture” to play or pause an audio or video element, which is enabled in Opera for Android, Chrome for Android, the default Android browser, Safari for iOS and probably other browsers. This makes some sense, since mobile devices are used in public and in bed, where unsolicited sound from random Web sites could be a nuisance. Also, autoplaying video ads would waste bandwidth.

The trouble is that this gets in the way of reasonable use cases like games or playlists, and developers are notimpressed. We’ve discussed this a lot internally at Opera, and as an experiment we’ve removed the restrictions in Opera beta for Android.

However, I’ve also found a workaround for current browsers. As of WebKit r108831, all restrictions are removed in the first successful load() or play() call. Any user gesture is accepted, so one can listen to all input events and remove the restrictions as soon as the user clicks, touches or uses the keyboard. One does not need to start playback at that point, but can wait until a later time. For example, one could “liberate” a number of audio elements for later use in a game.

I’ve prepared a demo of the workaround. It works in current versions of Opera, Chrome and Safari. While it does not work in the default Android browser prior to KitKat, even there it could be adapted to e.g. autoplay background music by calling play() instead of load() in the input event handler.

Given this, I think that either a user gesture should be required for every play() or the restrictions should be removed completely. My tentative suggestion is the latter.

On October 1, I began working in Opera’s new Web Technology team, tasked with improving the Web platform by contributing to the Chromium and Blink projects. Most of my effort has been on the Blink side, and it has been a very pleasant experience so far. Since I’ve worked so much with <video> before, I jumped right into that area and looked for things to work on. Chromium/Blink is a big code base which will take time to get intimately familiar with, but I was still able to make small improvements in a few areas.

One year ago

Also this month, one year has passed since my final commit in Core (Presto), which was on October 12, 2012. I was a little bit sad when I noticed this anniversary, but at the same I’m really happy about working on Chromium and Blink. Hopefully the next month will be even better!